AWicons Review

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Create, edit and manage your icon library with AWicons Pro, our “TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award winner.” This program has a customizable interface and can quickly create stylish icons from your original designs or from imported PNG, GIF, BMP or JPG files. AWicons Pro fully supports Windows XP icons and all color formats up to True Color with alpha. It has powerful library tools that can quickly pull images from your system and keep your icons logically organized.

AWicons Pro comes with a complete set of editing tools that can add distinctive effects like aqua, shadow and bevel emboss as well as modifiers such as anti-aliasing, multi-color gradient and transparency.

However, this product is not Vista compatible like IconWorkshop and IconCraft.

Creating Icons:

With AWicons Pro you can design your own icons using many drawing tools like pen, line, ellipse, polygon and more, or create them from existing images. It has a search function that can pull icons from Windows executables, libraries and animated cursor files, ZIP and RAR archives or from the clipboard. This program supports all color formats including True Color with alpha and has a multilingual interface. AWicons does not yet have the ability to create Windows Vista compliant icons.

Editing Icons:

AWicons edits icons using drawing and effects tools such as shadow, hue, saturation, 3D shadow, sharpen and more. Changing the opacity, brightness or format of an icon is easy through the drop down menu or tool bar. While you are changing the color effects, you can actually see how it changes your icon without having to leave the dialogue. You can load and save images in many formats including PNG, GIF, BMP and JPG.

Managing Icons:

Through AWicons' library manager you can save, open and create libraries as well as add or remove icons easily. However, the library manager does not support the import or export of icons. You can only add or remove icons from an ICL library. Any icons saved in executable files (EXE, DLL, OCX, SCR) have restricted access.

Ease of Use:

AWicons is relatively easy to use. It includes step-by-step tutorials to help you create original icons and edit existing images. Some functions, like adding text to icons and working with icons in libraries, are more straightforward with IconWorkshop.

Help/Support:

Lokas Software has included step-by-step tutorials and a quick search option for interprogram help. They also provide email support and user forums for technical support. They answered our email questions quickly.

Summary:

Overall, AWicons is a good product for creating, editing and managing icons. This program supports over 20 languages and can store images in a wide variety of formats and sizes. However, if you need a product that is Vista compatible, see IconWorkshop.

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